Raised on a family farm in the Pacific Northwest, Allen Braden has deep connections to rural life. Even at its most lyrical, his language evokes the local dialect of the West, his West. These poems, balancing elegy and affirmation, measure human and animal relationships with "brute geometry" in order to calculate the damage we require of ourselves. Returning to variations of a sonnet titled "Taboo against the Word Beauty," Braden relentlessly pursues the possibility of naming the beautiful without ignoring what has so often and so widely been destroyed by human hands.

Contains poems chosen to foster a love of language in students of any age level, including works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Longfellow, Frost, and Yeats; and includes dictation selections to help improve writing ability, and study questions for many of the poems.

A Coretta Scott King and Printz honor book now in paperback. A Wreath for Emmett Till is "A moving elegy," says The Bulletin. In 1955 people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral held by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. In a profound and chilling poem, award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement.

"Ringing with the deep sentiments of the season, these classic and modern Christmas poems bring just the right splash of holiday cheer."--BOOK JACKET.

In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets- from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder- have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale.

Wreaths for a Wayfarer is an assemblage of original poems written by established and emerging African writers that celebrate Pius Adesanmi, who died in the doomed Ethiopian Airline flight on March 10, 2019.

A poem about the visit that Santa Claus pays to the children of the world during the night before every Christmas.

This book talks about Kenneth's twenty-seven essays written over a period of time of more than forty years. It remains the sanest guide to the cultural upheaval in American society since World War II.